HP Photosmart 6510 review

HP’s Photosmart 6510 is designed for the home customer who has an interest in photography and probably owns a smartphone or tablet. It’s a neat all-in-one, forsaking the glossy black look of its predecessors in favour of brown and gun-metal grey. It’s unusual, but not unattractive.

The flatbed scanner has no Automatic Document Feeder (ADF), so it’s best suited for scanning single sheets or magazines. The control panel uses a 9cm touchscreen and a series of dedicated touch buttons down either side. The touchscreen is generally easy to use, though we did stumble upon an error display – for a poorly fitted cartridge – where there was no Cancel or Escape button.

There are twin paper trays fitted to the machine, though the main A4 tray takes only 80 sheets, which means frequent refilling. The photo tray slides freely back and forwards, which makes it fiddly to load. There aren’t any paper stops fitted to either tray.

The front panel has slots for an SD card and a Memory Stick, but there’s no USB port if you prefer to connect a camera directly. Computers can be connected using either USB or wirelessly. The latter allows remote computers to print to the 6510 over the internet using HP’s Eprint technology while iPhone and iPad users connected locally can print using Apple’s Airprint system.

See more: HP reviews | Printer reviews

There are separate ink cartridges for cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks and clip easily into place in the print head – the aforementioned poorly fitted cartridge was our fault. Bundled software includes HP’s basic-but-handy Photo Creations program for creating projects such as calendars.

HP claims speeds of 11ppm (pages per minute) for black and 7.5ppm for colour print from the Photosmart 6510. But it has a comparatively long ‘first page out’ time - where the machine primes its tanks and checks paper type - regularly taking more than 20 seconds. We saw a maximum black speed of 7.3ppm, with 3.9ppm for colour, though it did manage 4.6 sides per minute when printing duplex, which is a good result. A colour copy took 35 seconds and a 15x10cm print took just over one minute.

Printed black text looks sharp, while colour graphics and text are just above average with some slight banding in solid areas of colour. Photos look great and scans from the flatbed are detailed and have good colour fidelity.

The ink cartridges are available in standard and XL versions. Using the XL inks gives running costs of 2.5p for ISO black and 7.7p for ISO colour, both of which are good for a printer costing £100. There is a lot to like about the Photosmart 6510 and, despite its annoying paper trays and the occasional menu dead end, it does what it sets out to do very capably.